Critical reflections on the category of religion seem to be rather counter-intuitive for most sociologists. When ‘critical religion’ perspectives have been acknowledged by some sociologists of religion, I argue, these critical perspectives have not been understood correctly and constructively. It has still been the norm in sociological discourse that the term ‘religion’ is utilised in a generic sense, as a self-evident analytical category, as if sociologists know what religion really is.

My article starts with critical reflections upon recent sociologists’ responses to ‘critical religion’ perspectives. The general attitude of sociologists towards ‘critical religion’ is negative. Sociologists, whom I briefly review in the article, tend to conceptualise ‘religion’ as a historically differentiated social domain, which has established its distinction from other domains such as ‘politics’, ‘science’, ‘education’, ‘law’, ‘mass media’ and the like. This has become the basis of sociologists’ conceptualisation of religion as a self-evident reality.

‘Critical religion’ perspectives would agree with sociologists’ understanding of religion as a historically differentiated social domain, but this is why ‘critical religion’ has turned ‘religion’ and its demarcations from other domains into a subject of critical deconstruction. Although sociologists are well aware of the historical construction of religion (whatever they mean) as a historically differentiated institutional system, they seem to turn a blind eye to the norms and imperatives which govern such a construction.

In the article, I urge sociologists to pay more critical attention to the social process of institutional differentiation and classification which construct the category of religion, particularly, the issues of ideology and power which demarcate ‘religion’ from other domains. I believe that this echoes the critical spirit the discipline of sociology inherited from its historical founders. However, sociologists might be threatened by this approach to ‘religion’ since it undermines the epistemological foundation upon which the discipline stands.

In the second half of the article, I have tried to deconstruct the idea of religion reified in Grace Davie’s Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (1994). As the main title indicates, this book explores the empirical findings on ‘religion’ as it is commonly understood and measured in Britain. Therefore, the idea of religion in this book represents what is generally meant by ‘religion’ in Britain.

In the discourse of religion in Britain, atheism and nationalism are assumed to be ostensibly ‘non-religious’ and ‘secular’ value orientations. However, given the functional and structural similarities between atheism and nationalism, on the one hand, and what is said to be ‘religion’ in the book, on the other hand, I tried to highlight the desires of classifiers. In this case, the classificatory practice of atheism and nationalism as non-religious secular has an intimate relationship with norms and imperatives of liberal democratic states, which exclude its rival value orientations from its operation by classifying them as ‘religion’. In this light, the category of religion itself is ‘ideological state apparatus’.

This argument is further clarified by interrogating the statistical classification of religion referred to in the book by Davie. I indicated that the taken-for-granted categorisation of Christian beliefs and churches as religion, as manifested in various social statistics, has been a consequence of the historical process whereby modern nation states gradually established dominance over the church. In addition, the inclusion of various non-western traditions and value orientations under the umbrella category of ‘world religions’ has been intimately linked to the historical process by which western colonial power extended its hegemony on a global scale.

The practice of classification is always governed by specific norms and imperatives of classifiers, and it is also interrelated to interests of the classified in complicated ways. In my opinion, this can be an area of sociological inquiry. However, in order to critically study the religion-secular distinction and construct meaningful academic discourse, we have to abandon the generic concept of religion as an analytic category, since it is such a conceptualisation of ‘religion’ that is to be the subject of critical deconstruction. This would be a painful process for sociologists, since the intellectual tradition of the discipline has been deeply embedded in the religion-secular distinction, whereby ‘religion’ has already gained an independent ontology as a generic and analytical category.

In conclusion, I have suggested that a critical reflection of sociological discourse on religion should start from the most basic level. I have pointed out that the category of religion has been taken for granted in an introductory text book of sociology for undergraduate students. It has usually been the case that the difficulty (if not an impossibility) of defining religion has been highlighted in the beginning, but the rest of the book proceeds as if we all know what religion is. Studying what is generally known as religion may be useful as case studies of particular institutions, social practices, value orientations, social movements, and the like. For sociological study of religion to be meaningful, it should focus on why something is categorised as religion and why someone is identified as religious, for example, by examining norms and imperatives of such classification and identification. Otherwise, the problematic discourse of generic ‘religion’ will continue to be reproduced by the next generation of sociologists.

Critical deconstruction of the religion-secular distinction indicates that if sociologists wish to critically address in a more meaningful way human suffering, which is occurring under the global system of modern nation states, it is fundamental to overcome the current discourse embedded in the secular-religious binary. From ‘critical religion’ perspectives, it is no exaggeration to claim that sociological discourse ultimately serves interests of modern nation states as long as utilising ‘religion’ as a generic and analytical category. If one wishes to critically analyse modern liberal democratic society, it is methodologically important to remove one’s discourse from the religion-secular distinction.

I hope that my modest contribution invites some sociologists to seriously reflect upon the category of religion and bring the issue of ‘religion’ to the heart of sociology in a more meaningful way.

Professor Christian Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology was published in August 2014 from Oxford University Press. This book attributes the norms and imperatives of sociology to the notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’. It challenges the presumed idea of sociology as a secular, naturalistic, rationalistic, and scientific enterprise. From the critical religion perspective, this book can be read as a self-reflection by a sociologist about the apparent secularity of the discipline. It is disappointing, however, that the book’s critical thrust against sociology did not directly penetrate the discipline’s religion-secular distinction.

Professor Smith stresses that the academic discipline of sociology is essentially a modernist ‘project’, which is “a complex, purposive endeavor requiring concerted effort sustained over time to mobilize, coordinate, and deploy resources of different kinds to achieve a desired but challenging goal” (p.3). The collective enterprise of sociology “is at heart committed to the visionary project of realizing the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing, individual agents (who should be) out to live their lives as they personally so desire” (pp.7-8, Italic original). The same is repeated in the Conclusion (p.189)

According to Professor Smith, these shared commitments of the sociological project are the sacred in the Durkheimian sense. Sacred matters are “reverenced, venerated, and defended as sacrosanct” and sacred objects are “hallowed, revered, and honoured as beyond questioning or disrespect” (p.1). In the same way, the sacred project of sociology has “particular power to motivate and direct human action” (p.2). The sociological sacred thus “compels sociology to work to expose, protest, and end through social movements and state regulations and programs all human inequality, oppression, exploitation, suffering, injustice, poverty, discrimination, exclusion, hierarchy, and constraint of, by, and over other humans” (p.189).

The project of sociology is also ‘spiritual’ in the sense that sociological concerns “speak and respond to what is most worth living for, what purposes merit our devotion, what goods are to be most prized, what ends are worth dedicating ourselves to realize” (p.2). The sacred project of sociology mobilises “sociologists in the struggle on behalf of the project’, and this “is a dedication of the human spirit to what is believed to be most worthy of one’s devotion, true goods to be cherished, and purposes justifying a life’s investment and dedication” (p.191). At issue are “concerns and ideals drawn from the deepest wellspring of people’s hearts” (p.191).

The project of sociology ought to be called ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ because “sociology’s project engages what is believed to be a noble moral cause of weighty human meaning, ultimate value, and world-historical consequence defining the ultimate horizons of vision, purpose, and devotion” (p.192). Importantly, the book begins by claiming that although sociology appears “on the surface” to be ‘secular’ (p.ix), at the deepest level it is actually a ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ project. Professor Smith further emphasises that sociology’s sacred and spiritual project closely “parallels that of (especially Protestant) Christianity in its structure of beliefs, interests, and expectation” (p.18) and repeatedly highlights the essential sameness between sociology and Christianity (pp.18-20).

In spite of qualitative resemblance between sociology and Christian ‘religion’, however, the book identifies sociology as ‘secular’. We can find the phrases such as: “sociology’s project represents essentially a secularized version of the Christian gospel and world view” (p.18) and “sociology’s sacred project is a secular salvation story” (p.20). The idea of sociology as modern and ‘secular’ is also embedded when Professor Smith states: “Sociology is an archetypically modern endeavour, and its deepest roots are sunk … in the modern project of reconstituting society on a rational, universal, secular basis” (p.119, emphasis added).

As the historical background of the emergence of sociology, the book explains, the so-called ‘wars of religion’ during the sixteenth and seventeen centuries made European thinkers “convinced of the need to ground social orders not on shared religious commitments (as in European Christendom) but on a more secular basis that would provide greater social stability and material prosperity” (p.120, emphasis added). From the critical religion perspective, this kind of historical understanding is a major drawback of the book’s critical thrust. For example, William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence (which is actually referred to at this point of the book) stresses that the story of ‘wars of religion’ is rather “a creation myth for modernity”, or “a soteriology, a story of our salvation from mortal peril” (p.123). It has a crucial legitimating function for the idea of ‘secular’ state. In this light, we should argue that by telling the story of violent wars of ‘religion’, the project of modernity and sociology constructs its ‘secular’ self-identity to naturalise and authorise its domain as ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ against ‘irrational’ and ‘unscientific’ ‘religion’.

It is from this stand point that it is right to say: “As a project, sociology belonged at the heart of a movement that self-consciously and intentionally displaced western Christianity’s integrative and directive role in society” (p.122). Then it should be continued like this: “It was a key partner in modernity’s world-historical efforts” to authorise and naturalise its social order as ‘secular’, ‘rational’, and ‘scientific’ by categorising functionally and structurally parallel Christian social order as ‘religious’, ‘irrational’, and ‘unscientific’ (rather than “to create a secular, rational, scientific social order” as originally stated) (p.122).

Then, if we modify other statements from the book (p.121), we can continue like this. Once the project of modernity gained serious momentum in the early nineteenth century, sociology was invented and it provided the conceptual tools by which to understand, explain, control, and reconstruct human societies. The religion-secular distinction is part of this new constellation. The categorisation of the project of modernity and sociology as ‘secular’, as opposed to the ostensibly ‘religious’ project of Christendom, authorised and naturalised the modernist and sociological understanding of the world.

This way of framing the issue more fundamentally challenges the ‘secular’ self-identity of sociology as opposed to ‘religion’, highlighting sociology’s resemblance to what is generally identified as ‘religion’. It is not to say that sociology is a religion, but to indicate the arbitrariness of the religion-secular distinction which ideologically classifies sociology as nonreligious secular.

As the book implies, there is no essential difference between sociology and religion. But what is not highlighted in the book is that the demarcation between ‘secular’ sociology and religion is an ideological construction. Classifying sociology as ‘secular’ naturalises and authorises its ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ project above ‘religion’. Another important issue which has been noted but not discussed in the book is sociology’s intimate relationship with the historical development of the modern nation-state. The religion-secular distinction has been utilised by the state to establish its hegemony by naturalising and authorising its norms and imperatives, while domesticating and controlling others as ‘religion’. Sociology has successfully gained its ‘secular’ status for its service to the modern nation-state.

In order for sociologists to be fundamentally self-reflexive, I would argue, what they should question is the religion-secular distinction which sociology is part of. Sociology’s self-identity as ‘secular’ (as opposed to religion) is part of a fundamental constituent of modernity. When sociology implicitly or explicitly claims its non-religious secularity, from the critical religion point of view, it ultimately functions as, what Louis Althusser famously called, ‘ideological state apparatus’. What concerns me is that as long as sociological discourse is embedded in the religion-secular distinction and sociology locates itself on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, sociology essentially serves the very ideologies it tries to subvert.

The philosopher Antony Flew (1923-2010) famously described a fallacy that has become known as the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy. It was even published in the (real!) Scotsman newspaper obituary:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again”. Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing”. The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing”.

This analogy is often used uncritically in thinking about the way in which identity informs understandings of religion. For example, after the 11.9.2001 attacks on New York and Washington many argued that although the aircraft used to crash into the buildings were being flown by Muslims, ‘True Islam is a peaceful religion’ and the perpetrators were therefore not true Muslims. True Muslims would not kill thousands of people in an attack like that – and, of course, the vast majority of Muslims around the world condemned these attacks. Maybe, therefore, even though they described themselves as Muslims, the attackers were not true Muslims?

In a Christian context, we can see something similar happening. Most Christians would argue that, according to their Scriptures, killing others is prohibited. And yet there are plenty of instances in which Christians kill other people. We don’t even need to look into distant history for that: George Bush and Tony Blair both professed themselves to be Christians, and yet they presided over devastating attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq resulting in hundreds of thousands of people being killed. But if true Christians do not kill, perhaps neither Bush nor Blair are true Christians?

This way of thinking, as Flew wanted to show, leads us nowhere. Can we comment on whether someone is a true Scotsman (or Muslim/Christian etc.)? Perhaps the problem here is the reification of a position into an identity marker. Hamish McDonald might have a certain idea of what a true Scotsman is, but this idea centres around an abstract imaginary of the concept ‘Scotsman’ (and the Aberdeen sex offender clearly didn’t fit that image). Using that kind of fixed notion, we will never find agreement on what a true Muslim/Christian (or even Scotsman!) might do. We clearly need to find other tools.

Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, cited by Sara Ahmed (p12), discuss the difference between ‘location’ as a fixed point and ‘position’ as a relative concept, and perhaps this offers us a helpful way forward: ‘”In geographical terms, ‘location’ fixes a point in space, usually by reference to some abstract co-ordinate systems…” while “‘Position,’ by contrast, implies location vis-à-vis other locations and incorporates a sense of perspective on other places.”‘

If we understand self-descriptions of individuals in terms of positions, rather than fixed locations or identities, we might find it easier to comprehend the 11.9.2001 attackers or the Bush and Blair warriors. After all, a statement such as ‘I am a Muslim/Christian’ (etc.) is usually made in relation to others: most obviously, perhaps, affirming commonality or marking difference. It is, to use Smith and Katz, an implied location in relation to other locations, with a sense of perspective on other places. This kind of positioning changes all the time, relative to our context. We can perhaps understand this relative positioning better by thinking about Judith Butler’s ‘turning’ when a police officer calls out, ‘hey you!’ We change our position in response to the call: we turn to see if we are the one the police officer is addressing, and our position relative to everyone and everything else around us – not just the police officer – therefore changes as a result of that address, even if the call is not really meant for us. Our location might not have changed, but our position has.

This kind of imagery can help us in thinking through some of the language used to describe positions. We can understand the Muslim or Christian attackers and their statements of belief as positions taken in relation to others, rather than as fixed locators or identities. This does away with the need to understand the true Scotsman problem in contexts such as those described above: we don’t then need to explain that true Muslims or true Christians would never kill others even if these particular Muslims or Christians did so. Rather, we can look at how others who position themselves as Muslims or Christians (etc.) understand these contexts, and construct an understanding on the totality of these representations, intelligently assessed.

This also helps us to understand the adoption of certain kinds of language in contexts that at first appear to be misplaced; in this sense it is very easy to see how some of the ideas underpinning Critical Religion could lend themselves to a simplistic racism and Orientalism. For example, it is important to think about how we understand an imam in Timbuktu who says that ‘Since the beginning of time Timbuktu has been secular. Timbuktu’s scholars have always accepted the other monotheistic religions. After all, we all believe in the one God, each in our own way.’* The CR scholar might protest: aren’t terms like ‘secular’ and ‘religions‘ (as opposed to ‘religion’, maybe) concepts that originate in a Western context, with little meaning in Islam? And yet: essentialising Islam in such a way, as if Islam in Timbuktu were the same as in Mecca, Beirut, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Detroit, is a failure to understand the positionality of the imam.

We need to take his statement seriously: he knows what he means with this language, and whilst we might understand the interview with the Western journalist as framing his comments, we also need to understand the Butlerian turn here: he is not (just, or even at all) necessarily moulding his language to suit her, the journalist, but is seeking to articulate a position, and in the articulation itself there is also a movement. Seeking to pursue a constructivist position as far as we can possibly take it enables us to hear the imam and understand his reworking of the terms that we thought we understood – he is repositioning these terms and this language in adopting it and making it his own. Whilst it might be of historical interest that terms like ‘secular’ and ‘religions‘ originate in the West, understanding the re-positioning and re-use of these terms should enable us to begin to better understand those who might appear to be the Other, leaving the No true Scotsman fallacy and our essentialist historical notions behind.

British sociologist of religion, James A. Beckford, writes on the opening page of his 2003 book Social Theory and Religion that “disputes about what counts as religion, and attempts to devise new ways of controlling what is permitted under the label of religion have all increased” (Beckford 2003, 1). He calls this de-regulation of religion and sees the development as one of the hidden ironies of secularization.

So far some scholars have responded to the situation Beckford sketches, but the mainstream study of religion has not. Scholars, such as David Chidester, Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell T. McCutcheon and others, have analysed the formation of the modern discourse on religion and suggested that it has had two main functions. First, it has supported colonialism by distributing Western meaning systems elsewhere and, more specifically, “religion” has been a tool for deciding how to treat colonized people (depending on whether they were regarded as having “religion” or not). Second, it has been significant for the formation of “secular” nation-states by “domesticating dissent” (McCutcheon 2005), i.e. dividing people, practices and groups into private and non-political (“religious”) and public and political (“secular”) spheres.

The formation of the modern discourse on religion is still in operation in contemporary societies. That is why studies focusing on it are relevant not only for understanding the past, but they help us in analysing today’s situation as well. If Beckford is correct in suggesting that disputes about what counts as religion have increased, we need to pay more attention to recent negotiations and demarcations and see how, where and why the disputes take place.

One of the cases I have studied and written more extensively elsewhere (Taira 2013) dealt with a Jedi Knight who was escorted out of the Jobcentre in Southend in south-east England in 2010, because he refused to take his hood off. Job seeker Chris Jarvis, white young adult, claimed that his Jedi religion requires him to wear his hood up in public places.

Jarvis made an official complaint and three days later he was apologised to by the personnel. The printed apology from the Jobcentre Plus manager stated:

“I was sorry to hear of your recent experience and have investigated the issue you have raised. Jobcentre Plus is committed to provide a customer service which embraces diversity and respects customer’s religion or belief. I would like to apologise that on this occasion you were asked to remove your hood which you have stated is not acceptable as part of your religious belief.” (Levy 2010)

This apology was followed by the media coverage of the case. For Jarvis, this was his “Jerry Springer moment”, a short experience of fame of a person whose social status is low. I have analysed the motives and justification of Chris Jarvis’s claims in detail elsewhere (Taira 2013), but it is important to note that his statements were explicitly directed towards minorities who have gained dress-code exemptions on the basis of “religiosity”, thereby suggesting that increased immigration and discourses about diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism and so on – not only secularization – are important factors in understanding the dynamic of current negotiations over “religion”. Furthermore, without reference to Jediism as a religion and its requirement to wear a hood up, who would listen to Chris Jarvis? Claiming Jediism as his religion gave him a voice and made it count, at least to some extent.

The media cannot prevent Jedis making claims on the basis of “religion”, and the media cannot prevent the Jobcentre from apologising, but the media are more powerful than Mr Jarvis or the Jobcentre in offering the framework for interpreting the case. The tongue-in-cheek style of newspaper coverage indicates that the media makes a distinction between serious or real religions and fake or inauthentic ones, thus downplaying the opinion of Chris Jarvis and maintaining the existing discourse on religion.

What happened with Chris Jarvis is just one case, but it provides some ideas about the prospects for future studies. Scholars can look at the media, courtrooms, government policy debates, healthcare, prisons, army and schools. They are venues where disputes about “religion” are held. Rather than jumping into the debate and suggesting that X is essentially religious or secular, authentic or fake, scholars can ask, what is at stake in these disputes? Why do some people and groups want to be classified as “religious” or (nonreligious) “secular” and why is the issue negotiated at all. What are people trying to achieve by making claims about religiosity? Who benefits?

There is not only an increase in disputes about what counts as religion or religious, but a qualitative shift I call here – for the sake of argument, at least – a reflexive moment. People are strategically and often quite consciously claiming to have a “religion” (or, in other cases, denying it), depending on the practical purpose it may serve. In this sense, the category of “religion” has to face its own modern history. Consequently, “religion” becomes ever more contested and a disputed category in various public institutions.

Scholarly standpoints in the study of religion are often divided between those who see some analytic value in the concept of religion and those who see “religion” as a discursive item to be analysed. This debate is often re-framed as a distinction between realism (or critical realism) and social constructionism (see Schilbrack 2014). I think that the issue is more complicated, because it is possible to be a realist or critical realist and challenge the analytic value of religion as a theoretical concept. Therefore, while the link between social constructionism and studying discourses on religion is common, it is not necessary. Likewise, the link between critical realism and seeing analytic value in the category of “religion” is common, but not necessary. Furthermore, it is possible to say that religion may have some heuristic value in specific research projects, while proposing that the study of discourses on religion is significant. Moreover, even those who think that religion has analytic value and/or regard themselves as realists or critical realists can usually see the significance of studies focusing on the disputes revolving around “religion” and how society is organized by classifying certain people, groups, ideas and practices as “religious” or “nonreligious”. This means that my intention here is to redirect the debate and to emphasise the significance of studying how society is organized by discourses on religion, not to defend either critical realism or social constructionism. The practical problem is that, for reasons that are not clear to me, it is a small minority who is actually doing such studies.

Study of the category of “religion” in society is not just one possible research interest among others. It is crucial for providing case studies for a more general theoretical reflection of study of religion. Furthermore, and contrary to the voices who claim that a critical approach to the category of religion is destroying its institutional basis and the social relevance of the study of religion, I see it also as one way by which to make our work relevant outside academia.

Over recent decades, the academic concept of ‘religion’ has been examined critically by a number of scholars, especially, in Religious Studies. First of all, I would like to suggest, as a sociologist, that sociological discourse on religion (‘Sociology of Religion’) should be a subject of the same kind of critical examination. In the light of this scrutiny, I would like to take the concept of ‘religion’ itself as a subject for sociological investigation, and tentatively call this approach ‘Sociology of Religion Category’. Finally, I would like to demonstrate what a sociology of religion category might probably look like, by briefly examining the social construction of ‘religion’ in Japan.

Conceptualisations of ‘religion’ in Marx’s, Weber’s and Durkheim’s writings, for example, have been significantly influential over subsequent sociological discourses on religion. The existing literature focusing on their writings on religion implicitly indicates that the concept of ‘religion’ utilised by each Founding Father carries various historical and cultural baggage, specific to the society in which each of them lived, not necessarily denoting exactly the same social phenomena and the same aspect of human activities as each other. Likewise, it can be assumed that the notions of ‘religion’ shared by contemporary sociologists might have different meaning and nuances from those of the Founding Fathers, although they might also share some similarities.

Given this, the religion category in sociological discourse needs to be critically examined in the ways which have been carried out in Religious Studies. In my view, however, this has not been considered by many sociologists. When such an examination is posited, sociologists become defensive or positively acknowledge the criticisms but only partially reflect them in their own sociological discourses of religion, continuing the analytical use of the concept.

More importantly, such critical examinations of ‘religion’ can be extended to outside sociological literature, analysing the construction of religion category (and nonreligion categories) in the wider social context. Taking the critique of the term ‘religion’ seriously, studying religion sociologically should mean critically examining how the category of religion came into existence in the first place, in a particular social context; how particular value orientations and organisations have come to be socially categorised as ‘religion’; and what kind of assumptions and beliefs govern inclusion in and exclusion from, the category. This is what I call ‘Sociology of Religion Category’.

Now I would like to briefly examine the religion category in Japan in order to demonstrate a sociology of religion category.

In his book The Invention of Religion in Japan, Jason Josephson demonstrates how the concept of ‘religion’ was introduced to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. When Japanese translators first encountered the English word ‘religion’ in the 1850s, there was no indigenous equivalent. It was during the Meiji period (1868-1912) that the term ‘religion’ was gradually indigenised as a concept which included Christianity and Islam as well as Buddhism, with cultural baggage from the West, denoting a Christian notion of belief, especially that of Protestantism. ‘Religion’ as a newly imported concept was translated into Japanese in a number of different ways, but in the 1880s the word shūkyō established its place in the Japanese language as the translation of the term ‘religion’.

Importantly, the social category of shūkyō was constructed outside the realm of the Shinto national ethos (or ‘Shinto secular’). The state classified Buddhism, Christianity and sectarian Shinto (which had divorced from the state-authored Shinto institution) as shūkyō and utilised them as a means of ‘moral suasion’. Through the operation of interpellating or hailing particular groups and value orientations as shūkyō, the state had successfully made them docile and mobilised them for propagating the national ethos to the population. Any popular movement outside this state-religion coalition, which did not harmonise with the orthodoxy of Shinto secular, constituted the heterodoxy called at best ‘pseudo religions’ (ruiji shūkyō), and at worst, ‘evil cults’ (jakyō). They were subject to harsh persecution.

The social category of shūkyō was reformulated after the Second World War during the Allied Occupation between 1945 and 1952. While the pre-war category of shūkyō was limited to the ‘three religions’ (i.e. Buddhism, Christianity, sectarian Shinto), the post-war category of shūkyō includes various other faith groups, which would have constituted the pre-war heterodoxy. They are currently termed (mainly by scholars) as ‘New Religions’ (shin-shūkyō) or ‘new New Religions’ (shin-shin-shūkyō). Importantly, it also includes Shinto, which constituted the pre-war Japanese secular. After Japan surrendered to the Allies on 15 August 1945, the first task of the Allied authority was the demolition of the pre-war Shinto secular. The so-called Shinto Directive, issued by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Power (SCAP) on 15 December 1945, effectively reduced Shinto to the status of a voluntary organization by defining Shinto as a religion.

In addition, the post-war Japanese religion category was configured as an ostensible entity which is somehow distinguishable from the state. However, this constitutional separation has not been clear-cut. One example is ‘official visits’ by the prime minister and his cabinet to the Yasukuni Shrine. The interpretation has been polarised along ideological lines between right and left. The Japanese right perceives visiting Yasukuni as an expression of patriotism, while the left sees its veneration as a ‘religious’ act, therefore, in breach of the constitutional separation of religion and state.

Another example of the ambiguity of the term is how the Japanese term shūkyō is deployed strategically in people’s everyday language. For example, most Japanese people associate the term shūkyō with Christianity and Islam as well as ‘New Religions’ and ‘new New Religions’. The stereotypical image of these specifies that adherents show their commitment to daily practice of their faith, including a participation in activities to propagate their beliefs to others. For this reason, the Japanese are likely to identify themselves as ‘nonreligious’ (mushūkyō) when they are asked the question: ‘Do you believe in any religion?’ The claim of mushūkyō could be seen as an expression of the social norm, to which the emphasis on personal faith is fundamentally alien. The social norm of mushūkyō discursively and symbolically eliminates shūkyō from the structure of social relations, as a source of conflict, disharmony, or ‘pollution’, in order to maintain the existing order.

What various sociological studies of ‘Japanese religion’ have indicated, but not discussed extensively, is that the term ‘religion’ has been employed strategically at different levels of society, in order to distinguish what is called ‘religion’ from what is in turn defined as nonreligion or the secular. What remains to be investigated critically are the ways in which the boundaries between religion and nonreligion or the secular, are demarcated.

Having participated in a number of Critical Religion events, including two workshops held at Stirling, I can report that Tim Fitzgerald, Naomi Goldenberg and I have submitted for review the manuscript of a volume with the title Modern Government, Sovereignty and the Category of Religion: Beyond the Post-Secular.

The core argument of the book is that religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have marked out their sovereignty – as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. Our authors, selected from a host of contributors to seven workshops held between 2009 and 2012, bear out the argument through a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, moral philosophy, theology and religious studies, combining theory with the detailed empirical analysis of contexts as diverse as Japan, Mexico, the United States, Israel-Palestine, France and the United Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served to define the sovereignty of modern government.

Edith Doron spoke at an Aberdeen workshop in 2009 of the Abrahamic hut that she constructed while working at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Just tell me one thing, asked the anxious director, is this a cultural or religious exhibit? Similarly, employers and teachers alike find themselves deciding whether someone’s dress falls within the boundaries of acceptable “cultural” diversity or constitutes an inappropriate and perhaps illegal display of “religious” symbolism. There can be ambiguity and that can lead to controversy, such as when the UK Supreme Court in 2009 was asked to rule on whether Jewish Free Schools were deciding admissions on the basis of legitimate “cultural” criteria or were discriminating on the basis of “religion”. The distinction between “religious” and “cultural” is only one example of the range of ways in which we distinguish between religious and non-religious or secular. In the same year, The Times columnist Libby Purves complained of an Islington clerk who was allowed to refuse to perform same-sex civil partnership ceremonies on religious grounds. She should, wrote Purves, have “sighed, muttered a prayer, and found another job. The tribunal should never have rolled over as it did, agreeing to exempt a public servant from civic duty. Religion is religion, law is law”. Such controversies indicate that the distinction is anything but cut-and-dried. Only rarely, however, does the ambiguity lead us to question the categories themselves—to ask what we mean in the first place by religion and by culture or law or politics, and why we find ourselves moved to distinguish between them.

The volume is the fruit of several years of sustained debate in our workshops and conferences (including a major British Academy conference in 2010) about what happens when “religious” gets distinguished from “non-religious” or “secular”. Our debates have focused on the consequences of religious-secular distinctions. How and why do people – politicians, academics, peasants, managers, teachers, journalists, clergy, workers, lawyers – distinguish between “religious” and “non-religious” or “secular”? And what happens when they make such a distinction? Some of those consequences are very specific while others are general and far-reaching. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum director was clearly anxious about losing funding or visitors. Employees may have to think about what jewellery or clothing to wear to work. School pupils and their parents need to reflect on the uniform code, while Catholic or Jewish school boards may find themselves defending their admission policies. The Islington Civil Registry had to find another clerk to perform the ceremony, while taking back the clerk who was suspended. Those are specific consequences of particular ways in which “religion” gets distinguished from the “secular”. Our authors focus on the more general consequences of more structural or systematic religious-secular distinctions. The Islington Civil Registry was only applying a piece of legislation which defined the limits of “religious freedom” in administrative law, and was itself was likely modelled on legislation elsewhere. School uniform codes and admissions policies have a long and complex history; the case of Jewish Free Schools was only one episode of it. Beyond the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the broader history of museums has much to do with marking out a sphere outside “religion” in which objects can be displayed in ways that might otherwise prove sacrilegious.

In the volume, we concentrate mainly on the category of religion as it has crystallised in modern times, by which I mean the past three centuries, roughly, of Europe’s struggle to establish the world order under which we live. There are lively debates about the possible pre-modern roots of what we mean today by “religion”. My co-editor Naomi Goldenberg, for example, draws on Daniel Boyarin (2004), S.N. Balagangadhara and De Roover (2007) and other scholars who trace our modern concept of religion further back into the history of Christianity. Goldenberg even suggests that its roots lie in ancient Greek ways of classifying cults. I accept that our modern category of religion was already in gestation before the modern period. Indeed, I argued in a previous publication (2012) that the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta, writing in 1590 of the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the Americas, took an important step toward our contemporary sense of “religion” by distinguishing Aztec “religion” from other, implicitly “non-religious” things that Aztecs did. It was only a step, however, and I believe that the category continued to develop in the centuries that followed. Of course “modern” is a gross generalization for the period, especially if one takes a global perspective as we have done. Our authors make it abundantly clear that modernity has had no single history. But the historical processes of this period – state-building, colonialism, capitalism – have connected up places in a way that warrants generalization.

Our authors show that the category of religion has played a key role in this modern period. Religious-secular distinctions are written into the entire fabric of modern life, such that to figure out the category of religion is to figure out much of what passes for modernity. Or at least, to take religion for granted – to assume that religion is an object in the world, independent of the category – is to miss much of what modernity has meant. To take religion for granted is, to begin with, to mistake for history one of modernity’s foremost origin myths, the Wars of Religion story. Religion was the cause of the 17th-century European wars, we are told, and the wars ended when European powers decided to tolerate religion instead of fighting over it. William Cavanaugh (2009) and co-editor Tim Fitzgerald (2007) have argued that the modern idea of religion was itself a product of the wars; in my terms, that it was an important stage in the gestation of what we mean today by “religion”. They have shown, moreover, that the category of religion developed in tandem with many other categories, such as tolerance. It was not just that people decided to add “religion” to the list of things that they tolerated. The idea of “tolerance” was transformed in the process – religion was the first object of the modern idea of tolerance.

We converge on one key aspect of the modern history of “religion”: the role of modern government in shaping the category. “Modern government” is another gross generalization, but there are important similarities in how governments have gone about the business of governing in these past three centuries. Governments everywhere have been caught up in colonialism and capitalism, which have pushed them to develop the extraordinary power that they now have at their disposal. Governments have not only appropriated functions that were exercised by other institutions, such as schools and law courts, but they have created an array of functions that did not exist previously, such as healthcare. Scholars have observed that governments exercising such functions have classified populations by gender, race, class and region and treated them accordingly. Less attention has been paid to the way in which governments classify institutions, practices and persons as “religious” and “non-religious”. Just as with gender, race, class and region, it is not that governments have simply applied religious-secular distinctions; governments have, our authors contend, played a key role in developing religious-secular distinctions in the first place. A 2007 volume edited by Fitzgerald highlighted the role of colonial encounters in shaping the modern idea of “religion”, and Fitzgerald went on to argue in his 2009 monograph that global capitalism is another arena in which “religion” has been forged. Our authors pay attention to the colonial and capitalist dimensions of modern government’s concern with the category of religion, while including other dimensions such as gender politics (Goldenberg and Finn), immigration policy (Nillson), church-state conflict (Stack), and peace-making (Israel).

Our authors treat many different aspects of government but emphasise how modern government has used the category of religion to stake its claim to sovereignty. Although Foucault (1980: 121) famously suggested that sovereignty was a thing of the past (“cutting off the King’s head”) and that modern government relies instead on disciplinary measures, it seems more reasonable to conclude that discipline and sovereignty have developed in tandem. The term “sovereignty” has been used in many ways historically and in recent years, but I mean it in the sense of the power to authorise. To have sovereignty is to decide what is and is not legitimate, as well as who can legitimately deviate from the general rule and when. Sovereignty in this sense is not new. Medieval European free cities, for example, were somewhat autonomous in their government, and burghers were allowed to trade in goods that were normally reserved for the Crown, yet the Crown claimed to authorise the activities of towns and cities by issuing them with royal charters. In the past three centuries, however, governments have extended the reach of their authority, as scholars such as Agamben (2005) have argued. They have appeared, on the one hand, to concede sovereignty by allowing for democratic representation. On the other hand, governments have created labyrinthine rules and regulations for any and every area of life, including health, education and the economy, while retaining the authority to decide what exceptions can be made.

We show in the volume that “religion” comes during this period to designate an extraordinary range of practices and institutions that government is unable to control directly, including some on which government is heavily dependent. Government is dependent on such institutions both for the business of governing (Owen and Taira list the roles performed by The Druid Network in prisons and hospitals) and for displaying its own sovereignty (Goldenberg and Finn point to the role of churches in state ceremonies). As such, these institutions pose a potential threat to governments’ sovereignty, but governments try to contain the threat by claiming to authorise them as “religion” and by policing the boundaries of that category. Thus government continues to rely on these institutions that it cannot control directly, while performing its sovereign ability to “authorise” these institutions in the first place. What government recognizes and thus admits as “religion” is subject, of course, to innumerable institutional struggles.

The on-going campaigns for the upcoming 2014 Parliamentary elections in India have put Mr Narendra Modi as the National Democratic Alliance candidate (NDA) headed by the right-wing political party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The coalition currently in power, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) headed by the Indian National Congress party, has been mired in various corruption scandals, a reason for increasing favorability for the NDA. But Mr Modi has been a very controversial politician. As a four-term (and current) Chief Minister of the north-western state of Gujarat, Mr Modi has been accused of expressing discriminatory opinions against minorities, specifically, Muslims. He is a member of the right wing Hindutva group, Rashtriya Swayam Sevak. In fact, a year into his first term as the Chief Minister in 2002, Gujarat saw a period of horrific communal violence that began when Muslim groups were accused of burning a train coach in Godhra that killed Hindu activists, which spiraled into violence against Muslim communities. Mr Modi has long been dogged by allegations that he refused to prevent the post-Godhra retribution committed against the Muslim communities after the train-burning incident.

Despite such a controversial history, Mr Modi’s polls numbers are indicating an increase in popularity and favorability as the next Prime Minister of India. As Desai has argued in this article, there is an issue of middle-class voters not opposing (at least openly) the Hindutva ideology of Mr Modi and the BJP. Importantly, Mr Modi’s campaign rhetoric has touted the neoliberal economic policies that he adopted in his home state of Gujarat that has seen significant growth of its economy. He has presented this as a divide between caste and religion on the one hand and development on the other; and he is presenting himself as a candidate pro-development. Thus, neoliberalism is used to show the seeming ‘secularity’ credentials of Mr Modi. He has repeatedly argued that his ideology of ‘inclusivity’ has been central to Gujarat’s trade policies, thereby ‘leveling the playing field’ for all and transcending differences in caste and religious identities. In fact, such a notion was put forward by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, a popular Indian-American proponent of neoliberalism, who has argued that Gujarat’s (and in fact, India’s) economic growth has transcended political, caste and religious differences. To an electorate experiencing a series of corruption scandals under the UPA government and stagnant economic growth, one can see why this rhetoric seems appealing.

However, this raises a question whether neoliberalism can be seen as a ‘secular’ ideology that transcends those identity markers in India that are often associated with ‘religion’ such as the caste system. The question of understanding economics as ‘secular’ science has been dealt with on many occasions in this Critical Religion blog. My focus here is to reflect on what understanding of neoliberalism pertaining to India one should consider. On the ‘new India’ that Zakaria sees as emerging, he wrote:

Starting in the early 1990s, New Delhi has been overturning the license-permit-quota raj and opening up the economy. The result is an India that is quite different from the one its founders might have imagined—a motley collection of communities, languages, and ethnicities living together in an open political and economic space.

This kind of narrative furthers the idea that Friedman argued in his now famous text, The World is Flat, that somehow, ‘secular’ economics would triumph and transcend the underdevelopment that exists on the ground because of ‘religion’, specifically caste and closely associated with that, class. Critiques of Mr Modi have pointed out how uneven the development brought in by neoliberalism in Gujarat has been. For instance, Desai argues that despite Mr Modi’s claims, his economic policies have benefitted the already existing middle-class Hindu communities whilst poverty and malnourishment has affected minority communities, especially the Muslim communities. Similarly, an article in First Post has argued that the Dalits continue to experience discrimination in society.

Workings of neoliberal policies are embedded in the social context. To look at these economic policies as the ‘secular’ solution towards development is problematic. Both Mr Modi and Mr Zakaria are disembedding the capitalistic benefits of these policies for their own ends. Within the context of India, neoliberal policies do not transcend caste or class identities but are shaped by them and politicians who have the power to administer and shape these policies. This is not to mean that the UPA government, as a ‘secular’ alliance, would have made these policies work better for minority communities. The ‘season of corruption scandals’ certainly did not leave the electorate reassured. But looking at neoliberalism as something that is removed from its social contexts, as Zakaria does in his essay, only lets campaigns such as Modi’s reframe the narrative to conceal the reality on the ground, that neither these policies nor Modi’s approach ensure ‘inclusivity.’ Zakaria himself says “Economic growth has created one more common element in the country—an urban middle class whose interests transcend region, caste, and religion,” which begs us to question, what about those communities that are being left behind? What is even more problematic with the Modi campaign and the BJP is that in addition to ‘lower’ class and caste communities being left behind, the BJP’s Hindutva connection reframes neoliberal development into a development of Hindu communities by a) emphasizing the superiority of the ‘Hindu’ identity; b) deliberately leaving other minority communities behind.

Hence, it is important to scrutinize (as some news outlets, such as the ones I have referenced above, have been doing) the rhetoric of the Modi campaign to ensure that development is not presented as an abstract concept that would render certain communities voiceless.

October 2013:
Note on Critical Religion: It is my assumption that scholars engaged in critical religion are essentially the atheists, feminists and de-colonists in the field of Religious Studies. I had dinner with a group of Religious Studies majors a few nights ago, and I was interested and somewhat disappointed to note that they generally defined ‘the religious’ as those who self-identified in that way. While Religious Studies departments can be replete with scholars drawing lines around ‘religious’ art or ‘religious’ clothes, implicitly using the adjective as an analytical category rather than as data itself, to my understanding, ‘Critical Religion’ particularly is a meta-religion-studies, looking at what people are calling ‘religion’, who is employing this label and for what reasons they are doing so. Critical Religion means examining the modern social attitude called ‘religious’, rather than apologetically calling human behaviour ‘religious phenomena’, something which does not exist, so naturally it is impossible to track or even define. Feminists have challenged and reconstructed history with a place for women within it, and de-colonists have given voice to a historically silent subaltern perspective. A large and contemporary body of work in Religious Studies is in many ways surprisingly still engaged in writing histories as (patriarchal, colonizing) Cultural Christians. Feminist and de-colonial theory, devoted to revealing and questioning unexamined systems of power, are the avenues which lead to Critical Religion. This seems to produce atheism, which is why the Women in Secularism conference series is relevant to Critical Religionists.

Atheism & Feminism

On May 17, 2013, some 50 core participants gathered at the Downtown Marriott Centre in Washington D. C. for the second annual conference about women’s involvement in secular movements. Up to 200 others attended for the keynote speakers. The conference was organized by the Centre For Inquiry, a not-for-profit organization which mobilizes on a variety of issues surrounding ‘secular’ concerns, such as scientific education in public schools, grief services for nonbelievers, and the demystification and de-vilification of all things contraceptive.

Over the course of the weekend, women engaged in atheist feminist activism had the opportunity to meet and discuss their work. Some women were best-selling authors, others scientists in the academy, and others were leaders in support groups within their communities. It is important to note that most of these women were and are actively engaged in journalistic activism via online blogs, Twitter, and other social media. (For a list of all the speakers and their lectures, click here.)

Toxic Religion and Toxic Patriarchy are the Same

Many of the activist-oriented conference speakers and panelists encouraged a coalition between the feminist movements and the secular ones, both to get more feminists to be atheists and to make the secular movement less elitist and oppressive. Essentially the secularists were engaged in convincing the feminists of the toxicity of religion and religion’s interference with the state, and the feminists were convincing the secularists that the fight to empower women is the keystone in reducing religion’s political influence. The result was feminists getting equipped with a more detailed understanding of the role of Christianity and Islam and patriarchy, and the secularists gaining a deeper appreciation for the role of feminist struggles in working towards secularism. Secularists and feminists were engaged in a process of seeing the dismantling of toxic masculinity and the dismantling of toxic religion as the same endeavour.

CFI Washington D. C.’s president and conference organizer Melody Hensley said that “issues of secular movements are issues of women’s safety and freedom.” The anti-feminist thrust of the predominant atheist movements, led by Richard Dawkins and others, suggests this is not a universal notion. Atheist groups consisting largely of wealthy, educated white males are focused on the science of anti-God-ness. Dawkins calls himself a “cultural Christian”, supporting ‘traditional marriage’ and other Christian constructions while intent on disproving the existence of an all-powerful God, male or otherwise. It follows that Dawkins supports ‘traditional’ gender roles and the idea of the father as head of the household. In this way, atheist movements may protect and inscribe oppression of women; they can erode Grand Narratives in one way, and perpetuate them in others. While I see feminism and atheism as part of the same project, it troubles me that this Dawkinsian atheism, disproving God with science, could potentially be the extent to which the secular movement goes. It is incredibly important to demonstrate the connection between the cultural institutions of Christianity and the cultural institutions of patriarchy. As Kathlyn Pollitt said, “religious texts are the rulebooks of misogyny.” Radio personality Sarah Moglia pointed out that statistically speaking, all social movements that do not reach the working classes (and women make up 70% of the world’s poor) are doomed to fail as they do not reach the institutionalization phase. The conference made clear that secularism as a social movement will not take root until it is inclusive, pervasive and skeptical, deeply penetrating not only the imaginary god but the system which both creates and is created by notions of it.

Another important discussion at this conference was that of nomenclature. There were many discussions and disagreements about what the movement should be called, how people should self-identify, and other issues which can be (and were) paralleled to the gay rights movement. I got the sense generally that although there were a few people who disliked the ‘secular’ title and preferred out-and-out atheist, there was an acceptance of allies in the movement. It was noted that as the term ‘feminist’ often precipitates a strong counter-reaction, so the word ‘atheist’ denotes criticism of the hegemonic paradigm and can’t be softened. This makes me think of Richard Cimino’s definition of atheism, which is “an oppositional identity in a culture of theism.” This oppositional identity creates many apologists, and potential allies of the secular (and women’s liberation) movements often focus on religion as a notion of ‘The Good’, or the positive effects of religions rather than the endemic oppression they inscribe. There has also been a great deal of ‘historical’ focus on religious persecution and religious freedom, and church-related abuses and violence are called ‘situational’, or ‘representative of the times’. Pollitt remarked that one need only read the Bible itself for an account of human rights abuses. The pervasive desire to imagine religion as ‘The Good’ results in a social forgetfulness that obscures the modern and political projects deploying God in state and in law. God went on the money and in the Pledge in the United States in the 1950s, and in contrast, France separated church and state in 1905. Investing the state with God-the-Father, and pretending he was always there is both anachronistic and political. Speaker and writer Jennifer Hecht notes that the feminist atheist movement needs to “establish a long history of secular women because the Christian world can be overwhelming,” and that “we have to be the ones to cultivate this memory.” When asked what the future would look like if atheist and feminist movements were successful, Pollitt responded that it would look as though atheism and feminism had always been popular. Whether or not that is the case remains to be seen, but every story told and every voice that speaks moves the discourse forward.

Critical Religion

One of the most interesting parts of this conference was that scholars of Religious Studies were not invited. The doctors of Science, Political Studies, History and Women’s Studies seemed to recognize that much of the work in Religious Studies, while likely well-intentioned, is apologetic and somewhat evangelical. Ultimately, Religious Studies scholars seem to be more committed to their subjects of study than to human rights, or perhaps conventional Religious Studies departments do not offer the anti-oppressive theoretical education which has become typical in some Social Sciences.

Critical Religionists are often adept at pointing out the flaws of our peers, but the work which is crucial to developing the movement lies in constructing better theoretical frameworks than the ones which exist currently in the field of Religious Studies. Work like Goldenberg’s Vestigial State Theory move beyond “standing in the conceptual space carved out by theistic religion” (Sam Harris, 2007). Indeed, scholars of religion are only beginning to have the language with which to describe “vestigial states called ‘religion’”. Feminist and post-colonial academic and activist circles are a fantastic place to see these developing frameworks in action; these are the frameworks that Critical Religion needs.

It appears to me that we are and have been for some time in the midst of a formative period of ‘secularism studies’. It also appears to me that this formative period is, and has been, marked by a desire for the search of the true essence of secularism.

It moreover seems to me as the will to hegemonize this newly emerging academic field is guided by a neglect of the insights from related disciplines such as critical religion theory and postcolonial research on religion, namely that a) there is no sui generis religion to be found which should call for caution in searching for a sui generis secularism, b) religion and secularism are contingently articulated categories bound to power and ideology, c) the secular state apparatus’ judiciary is most often involved in defining the boundaries of the religious and the secular by defining religion, d) the last centuries’ scientific articulations of religion have had deep ideological and political implications not the least in creating a European exception and a European universalism, and e) that these articulations have also legitimized Western politics and expansion such as colonialism, neo-colonial politics, and imperialist ambitions.

Now, the sociologist José Casanova has forcefully argued that the assumption that secularization is a historical fact attained a ‘truly paradigmatic status within the social sciences’ from the 19th century and onward. And that it was first during the latter half of the 20th century that theories of secularization were developed into more comprehensive systems of thought (with for example Thomas Luckman, Peter Berger, and Bryan Wilson). Together with the development of theories of secularization we have also seen a rise in interest and theorization of the ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’, especially during the Post Cold War era. The reasons for this interest can be explained by the somewhat sudden realization that ‘religion’ not only still had a grip of human daily life around the globe, but that it could be a force for political action where 9/11 is often taken as the emblematic evidence. Following Casanova’s line of argument, the reason for neglecting religion as a social and political force can thus be explained by the hegemony of the secularization thesis in the humanities and social sciences. ‘Religion’ is for example still a non-existent subject in many social science departments in European and American universities.

Recent research on the genealogy of the trinity ‘secularization-secular-secularism’ have helped to highlight and explain many of the epistemic and hegemonic assumptions that are inbuilt into the various disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. However, given the recent interest in the trinity it is a curious thing that it has been ‘rethought’ so many times. Here I will discuss one specific ‘rethinking’ of secularism.

Rethinking Secularism (Oxford UP, 2011) is the name of a recent publication by a number of eminent scholars working on ‘secularism’ from a wide variety of angles. The editors of the book are Craig Calhon, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. The title indicates first of all that secularism has been thought and secondly that this ‘thought’ secularism is in need of revision. My first presentation as a graduate student in 2007 was also called Rethinking Secularism. This is not to suggest that I was ahead of the above publication, nor is it to suggest that it plagiarizes my presentation, it certainly does not. Instead, I wonder what exactly I thought was in need of being rethought with secularism? Today when I look back at the presentation, I guess I wanted to pose a critique to what I understood to be a reigning hegemony in analysis of secularism. As it turned out, my choice in naming my endeavor as a ‘rethinking’ was perhaps unfortunate since what I ended up doing in my thesis was a deconstruction or on undoing of secularism (that is French secularism, or laïcité), rather than rethinking ‘it’. And herein lies a problem in the rethinking of something since it presumes that there is something to rethink.

To be clear, the editors of Rethinking Secularism state that secularism is “often defined negatively” against religion, meaning that the category “in itself” is not “neutral”. (loc. 168) I could not agree more. My own epistemological home ground (in discourse theory, poststructural theory, postcolonial theory, and critical religion theory) and my own research suggest that contemporary (French) secularism is a purely negative category. It is given meaning differently in different contexts and its articulated differently in different discourses. In France, although secularism is a highly non-contested category, there is no consensus on its essential meaning among researchers, among politicians, or among political activists; e.g. it is an important identity marker for the political left as well as the political far-right. Just as the editors suggest, secularism is here given meaning through a negative identification process based on the logic ‘I am not what you are’. This logic is made possible through a negative secular-other, which then most often is ‘religion’.

Based on the editors’ description of ‘secularism’ as a negative category, their conclusion comes as somewhat of a surprise to me. They suggest: “Secularism should be seen as a presence. It is something, [a phenomena in its own right], and it is therefore in need of elaboration and understanding”. (loc. 169) The editors thus seem to suggest that secularism, although being a negatively articulated political concept, still has a positive core, an essence if you may. In other words, they seem to suggest that although secularism is a political category void of essence, we should still act as if essence there is and furthermore that it is the task of the researcher in the social sciences and the humanities to find out what this essence is.

One seminal case in point in finding out this ‘something’ of secularism is the chapter in Rethinking Secularism written by the aforementioned José Casanova. Here I will only touch upon Casanova’s discussion of a) the relation between secularism, secularization, and the secular and b) the relation between secularism and religion.

a) Casanova sets out to analytically separate the trinity of secularization-secular-secularism. He argues that ‘the secular’ is a modern “epistemic category”, that ‘secularization’ is an “analytical conceptualization of modern world-historical processes”, and that ‘secularism’ is a “worldview and ideology”. (loc. 1308) Casanova then goes on to suggest that secularism “refers more broadly to a whole range of modern secular worldviews and ideologies which may be consciously held and explicitly elaborated into philosophies of history and normative-ideological state projects, into projects of modernity and cultural programs, or, alternatively, it may be viewed as an epistemic knowledge regime that can be he held unreflexively [sic] or be assumed phenomenologically as the taken-for-granted normal structure of modern reality, as a modern doxa or an ‘unthought’”. (loc. 1329) If ‘the secular’ is a modern ‘epistemic category’ and ‘secularization’ an ‘analytical conceptualization of modern world-historical processes’ I wonder what separates these two categories from ‘secularism’ (an ‘epistemic knowledge regime’ and a ‘philosophy of history’). If ‘secularism’ is such a potent ‘something’ that it enters into our ‘unthought’, if it is an epistemic knowledge regime creating a philosophy of history, is not the pertinent question to ask how secularism produces notions of secularization as an historical process and the secular as an epistemic category in the first place?
It seems to me that Casanova takes for granted that ‘secularization and ‘the secular’ have an independent meaning outside of ‘secularism’ and that it is secularism that somewhat perverts their true meaning. This leads Casanova to argue that “the core of the [secularization] thesis, namely, the understanding of secularization as a single process of functional differentiation of the various secular institutional spheres of modern societies from religion, remains relatively uncontested”. (loc. 1463) The problem with secularism is according to Casanova that it renders “the particular Western Christian mode of secularization into a universal teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief, from primitive to irrational or metaphysical religion to modern rational postmetaphysical secular consciousness”. (loc. 1430) Instead Casanova suggests, we should acknowledge secularization “for what it truly was, namely a particular Christian and post-Christian historical process, and not, as Europeans like to think, a general or universal process of human or societal development”. (loc. 1560.)
While I believe Casanova to be right in the assumption that one fundamental problem with secularism is how it seeks to universalize the theory of secularization, I am not so sure that a) secularization is a historical European fact and b) that ‘Europeans’ disagree here. One of the ideological problems, to use Casanova’s lingua, is that irrespectively of whether the secularization thesis is taken to be applicable on the entire globe or only on Europe, it still feeds into a modernist imaginary where Europe becomes the only successfully developed secular universal civilization, exceptionally developed and/or exceptionally unique.

b) To distinguish and qualify the analysis of secularism Casanova suggests that it “may be fruitful to begin by drawing an analytical distinction between secularism as statecraft doctrine and secularism as ideology”. (loc. 1591) With secularism as statecraft Casanova understands “simply some principle of separation between the religious and political authority… Such a statecraft doctrine neither presupposes nor needs to entail any substantive “theory,” positive or negative, of “religion”. (loc. 1594) However, Casanova argues that “the moment the state holds explicitly a particular conception of ‘religion’, one enters into the realm of ideology. One could argue that secularism becomes an ideology the moment it entails a theory of what ‘religion’ is or does”. (loc. 1597) If secularism as statecraft ‘simply’ is the separation of the ‘religious’ and the ‘political authority’, how is this separation done without the state deciding where to draw this separation by deciding what ‘religion’ is and does? Since one of the core arguments of Rethinking Secularism is that secularism and religion are negative categories, I cannot see how a non-ideological secularism could be fashioned at all, that even the ‘simple’ separation of the ‘religious’ and ‘political authority’ is a performative act entangled with power and ideology.

To conclude: I wonder if the desire to be a part of the emerging field of secularism studies does not lead some researchers into curious paradoxical epistemological predicaments, as I have tried to (very briefly) show here. It is as if the lessons from critical disciplines are listened to but not heard, as if they are brought up to be neglected, as if certain scholars know that it is very complex but at the same time ignores this complexity.

Our blog ‘critical religion’ receives contributions from many people, and they usually have the terms ‘critical’ and ‘religion’ in them somewhere. Some are much more clearly theorised than that. My own understanding of ‘critical religion’ is specific. For me, ‘critical religion’ is always about ‘religion and related categories’, because I argue that religion is not a stand-alone category, but is one of a configuration of categories. On its own, ‘religion’ has no object; it only seems to do so. Religion is a category that is deployed for purposes of classification, but it does not stand in a one-to-one relationship with any observable thing in the world. In modern discourse, ‘religion’ works as half a binary, as in ‘religion and secular’ or ‘religion and [secular] politics’. When we talk about religion today, there is always a tacit exclusion of whatever is considered to be non-religious. If, for example, we talk about religion and politics, we have already assumed they refer to different things, and to mutually incompatible ones at that. Politics is secular, which means non-religious. Religion is separate from politics. If the two get mixed up and confused, then there is a problem.

One thing to notice here is that there has been a massive historical slippage from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. What started in the 17th century as an ‘ought’ – viz. there ought to be a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘political society’ – has long become an assumption about the way the world actually is. In public discourse we have become used to talking as if ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ refer to two essentially different aspects of the real world, that we intuitively know what a religion is and what politics is, and we imagine that if we wanted to take the trouble we could define their essential differences. And yet of course the rhetorical construct of ‘ought’ keeps appearing, as for example when we insist that a nation that does not have a constitutional separation of religion and politics is undeveloped or backward; or when Anglican Bishops make moral pronouncements that seem uncomfortably ‘political’.

But what does ‘politics’ actually refer to? If the meaning of a word is to be found in its use, then we surely all know the meaning of ‘politics’. We use the term constantly. We have an intuitive understanding about what politics is. If we didn’t, how would we be able to deploy the term with such self-assurance? How, without understanding the term, would we be able to communicate about our shared and contested issues? We discourse constantly about politics, whether in private, or in the media, in our schools and universities, or in our ‘political’ institutions – and we surely all know which of our institutions are the political ones. Careers are made in politics. We join political parties, or we become politicians, or we enrol and study in departments of political science, and read and write textbooks on the topic. How could there be a political science if we did not know what politics is? There are journalists and academics that specialise in politics, journals dedicated to politics, distinct associations and conferences for its study, and thousands of books written and published about politics. Historians research the politics of the past. There is a politics industry. There are commercial companies that analyse and provide data on the topic of politics. Media organisations employ many people to produce programmes dedicated to politics and to political analysis, discussion and debate.

Yet the ubiquity of politics is our problem. For politics and the political is so universal that it is difficult to pin it down. Are there any domains of human living that cannot and are not described as being political, as pertaining to politics? If we try to find some definitive use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ by searching through popular and academic books, newspapers, TV representations, or the discourses on politics on the internet, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that everything is politics or political. We can find representations of the politics of abortion, the politics of hunger, church politics, the politics of sectarianism, political Islam, the politics of universities and university departments, the politics of medieval Japan, the politics of the Roman or the Mughal empires, the politics of slavery, class politics, the politics of caste in colonial and contemporary India, the politics of Native Americans in the 16th century, the politics of ancient Babylon, the politics of marriage, the politics of Constitutions, and so on and on. And we surely know that politics is as ancient as the hills.

This apparent universality of the political, its lack of boundaries, seems to place a question mark around its semantic content. If we cannot say what is not politics, then how can we give any determinate content or meaning to the term? This lack of boundaries can also be seen in the problem of demarcating a domain of politics from other domains such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. If we try to find a clear distinction between politics and religion, we find a history of contestation, but one that only seems to go back to the 17th century – a point to which I return in a moment. We find claims that politics and religion have – or ought to have – nothing to do with each other, yet in contemporary discourse we find many references to the politics of religion, and also to the religion of politics.

The term ‘political economy’ also points us towards this problem of demarcation. Some universities have departments of politics, some have departments of economics, and some have departments of political economy. How are they distinguished? This is especially perplexing when one finds books written by specialists on the politics of economics, as well as on the economics of politics. Add in works on the religion of politics and the politics of religion; or the religion of economics and the economics of religion: we seem to have a dog’s dinner of categories. You notice these things when you read outside your normal disciplinary boundaries.

It is also of interest that all of these can and are described as sciences: viz. the science of politics, the science of religion, and the science of economics. We cannot in practice easily if at all distinguish between the categories on which these putative sciences are based. Yet all of them have their own specialist departments, degree courses, journals, associations and conferences.

Another point is that all these ‘sciences’, based on concepts so difficult to distinguish and demarcate, are ‘secular’, in the sense of non-religious. Describing a science or discipline as secular reminds us that we have another demarcation problem. If all secular practices and institutions are defined as non-religious and therefore in distinction to ‘religion’, we need to have some reasonably clear understanding about what we mean by religion to be able to make the distinction in the first place. Without such an understanding, how would we know what ‘non-religious’ means? This paradox is magnified when we consider that for many centuries ‘secular’ has referred mainly to the ‘secular priesthood’ in the Catholic Church, and the priesthood are hardly non-religious in the modern sense.

We thus find that in everyday discussions and debates, and also in the more specialist discourses, we deploy concepts with a largely unquestioned confidence that on further consideration seems unfounded. Speaking personally, I entered academic work through religious studies, also known as the science (or scientific study) of religion, the history of religions, or the plain study of religions. Yet I cannot tell you what religion is, or what the relation between [singular] religion and [plural] religions is. I have made it a point over many years of tracking down a wide range of definitions of religion, and found them to be contradictory and circular. There is no agreed definition of the subject that so many experts claim to be researching and writing about. I suggest this is the situation in politics as well. Attempts that I have read to define politics, for example in text-books written for students of politics, seem always to be circular in the sense that they define politics in terms of political attributes, just as religions are defined in terms of religious attributes.

I suggest that the perceived self-evidence of politics as a meaningful category derives from an inherent ambiguity – and in this it is a mirror-image to religion. On the one hand, the term ‘politics’ generally simply means ‘power’ or ‘contestations of power’, and since power is probably one of the few universals in human relations we can see why it might appear intuitively convincing. However, on that understanding, it is difficult to see what is not about politics, because it can surely be argued that all human relations have always been about contestations of power. We gain such ubiquity at the expense of meaning. Surely, political science has a more specific and determinate meaning than power studies? You might just as well say that the study of politics is the study of humanity.

Our sense that there is a more determinate nuance seems justified when we discover that the discourse on ‘politics’ has a specific genesis in the English language in the 17th century. Though we can find a few (probably very few) references to ‘politicians’ in Elizabethan drama, ‘politics’ is even rarer, and I cannot find a sustained discourse on politics as a distinct domain of human action earlier than John Locke’s late 17th century distinctions, developed in his Treatises on Government, between ‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. Here Locke explicitly distinguishes between man in the state of nature and political or civil society on the one hand; and also between politics and religion on the other. In his religion-politics binary, Locke links politics to the outer, public order of the magistrate and governance, and religion to the inner, private relation of the individual to God. (What he means by ‘god’ is itself a conundrum, for the evidence is that, like Newton, he was a heretic, either a Unitarian or a Socinian. ‘God’ is another of those endlessly contested categories. If you try to define ‘religion’ as ‘belief in god’, you find yourself in another infinite regress of meanings).

It seems significant that this politics-religion binary is a modern, Enlightenment one, because Locke was arguing against the dominant understanding of Religion at the time. For his own reasons he wanted to reimagine ‘religion’. When the term religion was used at all (rarer than today) it meant Christian truth, and there was no clear sense (despite Locke’s claims) that Christian truth was not about power, or that it was separated from governance. The King was the sacred head and heart of the Christian Commonwealth, and what fell outside religion in this dominant sense was not a neutral non-religious domain but pagan irrationality and barbarity. In other words, what fell outside religion in the dominant sense of his day was still defined theologically and biblically in terms of The Fall. His privatization of religion to make way for a public domain of political society was an ideologically-motivated claim about how we ought to think about religion, not a neutral description of some objective facts.

It was especially in his attempt to legitimate new concepts of private property, and the rights of (male) property owners to representation, that Locke needed to completely revise people’s understanding of ‘religion’ as a private affair of the inner man (women were not much in the picture), in order to demarcate an essentially different domain called political society. This new binary found its way into written constitutions in North America, and is now naturalised in common speech and common sense. Today it seems counter-intuitive to question the reality of politics as a distinct domain of human practice. But this rhetorical construction was deeply resisted. Even the French Revolution did not succeed in formally separating religion and the state until the end of the 19th century. England was an Anglican confessional state until well into the 19th century.

Locke’s formulation was thoroughly ideological but has become naturalised through repeated rhetorical construction until now it seems to be ‘in the nature of things’. I suggest that, whenever we use the term politics with intuitive ease we catch ourselves and ask, in what sense am I using the term? Am I using it in the universal sense of ubiquitous power and contestations of power in all human relations? Or as referring to a specific ideological formation of modernity underpinning a historically-emergent form of private property-ownership and representation of (male) property interests? The elided slippage between the historically and ideologically specific formulation, and the empty ubiquity of ‘power’ as a universal in all human relations, lends the term its illusory quality of intuitive common sense.

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